Recent website changes

711 words general,

I made a couple more changes to my website: giving more credit to the authors of the papers I read and adding a new category.

Changes to the homepage

It’s important to give authors credit for their work. When writing paper summaries, I always made it a point to call out the authors of the paper at the top of the post. But I recently started thinking that I could do more.

On my website’s homepage, you couldn’t quickly see which posts were paper summaries and which were original. You also couldn’t always see the authors of the papers that I was reviewing. I don’t think I was hiding credit from them, but it wasn’t as obvious as it could have been.

I’ve now added a list of authors to the homepage in the post preview, and prepended [Paper] to the start of every post title instead of Paper:. This should be apparent because of how much I’ve been reading lately; it looks like this:

 

In Hugo, this was easy to do (but tedious). I added an authors = ["person1", "person2"] tag to the TOML front matter (example here), then changed the template for the post preview to include all of the author names. There were a lot of pages that already had the authors tag—I started adding it about a month ago, but didn’t do anything with it until now—but I had to go back through 20ish ones that didn’t.

Changes to the archives

Just like above, I added papers’ authors below the links within the archives and categories pages:

 

I rarely use these pages, but I wanted to make sure the authors’ names were displayed alongside their work wherever possible.

Adding a CHI 2020 tag

I’m quite thankful that I’m in a position where quarantine has given me time to read, rather than throwing me into a situation where I have to care for family members, work longer hours, or put my health at risk. I’ve used this time to read more, and I’m hoping to work through a lot of CHI 2020 papers in the coming weeks. I’ve already done a few posts:

I have many more listed on my reading list, so I added a tag for CHI 2020.

Future changes

Eventually, I want to make the author names clickable links that take you to an author’s page, where one could view all of the papers I’ve written about by that author. That shouldn’t be too hard—I think it’d be a similar treatment to how “categories” works now, but I will eventually have to work out how to do this.

I also need to come up with a better way of organizing content locally. I think it’s fine on the website (for now?), but as I write more, the number of posts in each directory on my computer is increasing rapidly. The "/content/papers” folder has 42 items in it, which makes finding the exact paper that I’m looking for a little challenging right now. This will only get harder.

I would like to further streamline deployment of the site; right now I have to commit posts to my sitev2 repo first, then use a Makefile to generate the static site and toss it into my tuchandra.github.io repo. I would love to be able to set up Github Actions to handle deployment for me—building every time I push and building nightly (for when I finish posts in advance).

Finally, I would like to be more consistent about using the Dr. honorific in front of the names of those researchers who have PhDs. This is hard to do: it’s not always apparent from an ACM DL entry, and including it can add visual clutter to a long list of author names. But female scientists in particular often have their credentials, erased, and so I will try to err on the side of including it too often.